According to the establishment media, critical race theory, or CRT, is a distraction. It is a right-wing smear. It is a conservative attempt to quash the dark side of American history. Most of all, according to the establishment media, you must never — ever — pay attention to the infusion of CRT into the nation’s institutions of power. According to MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, controversy over CRT is a “creation … It keeps people watching or it keeps people clicking.” According to CNN’s Bakari Sellers, CRT is just “America’s history.” According to The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart, those who criticize CRT are merely attempting to prevent “us from learning our history.”

Critical race theory, of course, is not America’s actual history. It is a perverse worldview, unsupportable by the evidence, in which all of America’s key institutions are inextricably rooted in white supremacy; it is an activist campaign demanding the destruction of those institutions. The founders of CRT have written as much. According to CRT founders Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, CRT is founded on two key premises: that “racism is ordinary, not aberrational — ‘normal science,’ the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country”; second, that “our system of white-over-color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material.” This means, according to Delgado and Stefancic, that “racism is difficult to cure or address” and that a formal commitment to legal equality on the basis of color-blindness is merely a guise for further discrimination. Furthermore, CRT founders say that whites are unable to understand racism, and that “minority status … brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism.”

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